Making up for lost time here, bear with me.....

Between April and October of 2015, I was extremely lucky to land a freelancing gig with Auckland International College, who wanted me to create a series of black-and-white illustrations for one of their English language textbooks - at first, I thought it was only for one or maybe two sets of drawings - but no, by the end, I'd created a grand total of twelve (6 or 7 drawings per set, you do the math), with subject matter ranging from Sherlock Holmes and the American Civil war to High School science and nature studies. Woo hoo! In addition to the one-off bits of subject matter, I was also tasked with creating several sets of 6-panel 'picture stories' that related little slice-of-life tales for students to write about and describe: as seems inevitable in cases such as these, I ended up with a cast of characters - assorted high school chums, as dictated by the brief - who somehow developed their own distinctive looks and soon started showing up in some of the one-off illustrations as well....

I really enjoyed doing all these illustrations, for a number of reasons: firstly, they were virtually all old-school pen and ink drawings (except where a particular diagram required a precision that only clean vector art could produce), and lots of them. Secondly, the varied subject matter forced me to research all manner of different things to get the right look, the right details - or, in some cases, find out what something even was (Yay! Book learnin'!) And thirdly, I was creating stuff that would in turn help people learn things; which is always a nice feeling......